Summer Job with the CIA - Or Not? Part II of II

Part I of this article revealed how Multinational Business Guides, aka Guides to Multinational Business, hired me for my looks; and that was no compliment. Multinational Business Guides' interest in my looks stemmed not from attractiveness but from my looking enough like everyone else in the office that without much effort, we could have passed for one another. Or, so I suspected. After all, the office manager expressed interest in hiring me when my friend working there told her how people confused us with one another. She arranged for me to be hired to type, despite my inadequate typing skills. And once I was on the job, she discouraged me from typing and pointedly told me to play a game instead. A game that involved learning the identity of foreign government officials, top to bottom, power player countries to the most obscure countries in the world. She insisted that this was all in fun, but let someone suggest a different game for fun, and she quickly redirected us back to this game. Though we questioned her with increasing curiosity about the nature of the work, she remained unflappable and pleasantly uninformative. Was she the ideal CIA agent? Or just someone who could have been?

The boss of this operation was a man we barely saw. He was not the approachable sort, in any case. Not the guy you would run up to and blurt out, "Hey, is this the CIA, or what?" He was elusive. We never knew where he was or what he was doing except on the rare occasions he stepped into our small quarters to erupt. He never erupted at us; we were all but irrelevant to this operation.

When the phone rang at 4 Brattle St. in Cambridge, only the office manager was authorized to answer. Christine and I and the other two typists collectively spoke 5 foreign languages: French, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Russian. Whatever language these phone calls were conducted in was none of those. It sounded sing-songy; perhaps it was a Scandinavian language.

Phone calls meant trouble. Our calm office manager raised her voice; her tone emanated fury and distress. Other than expletives, which freely flowed in these heated conversations, the only words of English were few and mysterious. References to Avon, and, in a frightening twist, "jewels" and "Norway." Who were we involved with here? What were they grooming us to do? The CIA was beginning to look like the best of the options! Above all, we shuddered at the office manager's menacing exhortations that "Jorge isn't going to like this." Who was Jorge, we wondered? Would he come rampaging through the office when she hung up? The office manager would never divulge Jorge's identity, shrugging off our questions and changing the subject. Upon cradling the phone, she reverted to the easygoing office manager we knew. Until the boss arrived, which he inevitably did not long after a phone call. Then those incomprehensible foreign words flew with the intensity of a maelstrom; something was wrong. Very wrong. The boss and office manager 's anxiety signaled impending disaster.

That we weren't working for a publisher of business guides was obvious. Were we working for the CIA? Had we stumbled into a ring of international jewel thieves? Or was "jewels" some sort of code word for something else?

One of the girls who worked with us was the daughter of a Congressman. Christine and I invited her to lunch, eager to hear her impressions of the nature of our office. She openly agreed that we could not be working for a publisher of business guides. She favored the theory that the CIA employed us. And, she nonchalantly declared her confidence that the government would protect us if somehow we were implicated in whatever startling and dangerous activities might lurk under the cover of Multinational Business Guides.

We tried to put the pieces together. Certain that Avon was not "ding, dong! Avon lady" Avon, we considered the options. There was a town not too far away by that name; there was a book publisher by that name; and there was a town in England with that name. Avon could also have been a man's name, we supposed. The publisher would have been promising, re-opening the possibility that business guides were somehow involved here, but from what we had seen of Avon books, multinational business guides weren't their fare. We concluded that Avon was a place; a place with some connection to the nefarious activities referenced in the phone calls.

Why did it matter that we had similar appearances? Or that we expressed an interest in foreign travel? Would we someday be asked to sneak across foreign borders using false identities? If so, why?

The boxes of envelopes we had typed were shoved aside carelessly into an unused corner of the office, toppling sideways. Their next destination would inevitably be the trash heap.

We played the game.

Tension crept through our consciousness as the office transformed from game room into crisis center and back again. We doubted that Multinational Business Guides was engaged in legal business, but was it illegal in the sense of government-sanctioned extralegal, or illegal in the sense of criminal? Multinational Business Guides paid its employees "under the table." Would this be our undoing? Would IRS or FBI agents storm the place? If they did, would we ever be able to convince anyone that we were not involved in the sinister activities of Multinational Business Guides?

At the start of Part I, you read the disclaimer that you would never learn whether you were reading about a summer job with a CIA front organization or some entirely different, criminal enterprise. To this day, I don't know myself. After a few days of playing games and witnessing dramatic verbal explosions, the anxiety overshadowed us; our curiosity kept us up talking nights, and rattled our nerves by day. Whatever Multinational Business Guides was doing in Avon or Norway with jewels or without, it had a criminal aura. The overwhelming sense that something nefarious was happening- and that somehow us innocents on the bottom rung would get blamed- propelled Christine and I into quitting. Then, in an abundance of precaution, we called the IRS and reported this employer for paying us under the table. The IRS agent laughed- yes laughed- when we reported our suspicions about the nature of the business. Two days later, W-2 forms appeared in our mail. And we never heard from Multinational Business Guides, aka Guides to Multinational Business, again.

To this day, I wonder what would have happened if we'd stayed. Surely, we'd have learned some of those foreign words and begun to navigate our surroundings. And then?

In this new age of open communication (smirk) what does the CIA say about its clandestine operations to the public? Interestingly enough, the CIA describes its Clandestine Service on its web pages for children: " If you worked in the National Clandestine Service (NCS), you would like to travel and have a great curiosity about the world and its different cultures. You would like to work with people from all over the world, be able to adapt to any situation (especially dangerous ones!), be well educated, know other languages, be good at working with lots of different kinds of people, and be courageous, well-disciplined and able to accept anonymity. The NCS officer knows that no matter how good a job he or she has done, most people- including his or her family or friends or the public- will never know it. The rewards for the officer are the knowledge that he or she contributed to the security of our country and is recognized by his or her peers."

And in the CIA web page FAQs, the CIA acknowledges its use of "operations officers" to recruit spies:

"Who is a spy? Are there secret agents like James Bond with secret gadgets?

A spy is someone who provides classified information about his country to another country. To clarify, CIA operations officers recruit foreign agents (you could also call them spies) who pass information to CIA. CIA operations officers do use some nifty "spy gadgets," and, while their jobs do occasionally present risks and challenges equal to the most exciting movies, for the most part, they are not nearly as glamorous or thrilling. Operations officers comprise only a small portion of the whole CIA workforce. Being an operations officer demands a forceful personality, keen intellectual ability, toughness of mind, and a high degree of personal integrity, courage, and love of country."

These descriptions straight from the CIA have a lot in common with our experience at Multinational Business Guides. There's just one little thing that gives me pause. They forgot to mention typing.